Cases of dental caries have tended to become less and less serious throughout Japan. The same istrue of Niigata Prefecture. Since 1973, our department has conducted surveys of elementary and juniorhigh school children in a rural community of the prefecture to grasp the state of health in theiroral environment The annual surveys have also found the same tendency.
Our research in the same village focused on children who were born between from 1983 and 1986to study the incidence of dental caries. Based on the results obtained up to 1998, we examined thecaries incident in the permanent dentition according to the types of teeth, and at the same time analyzedthe correlation between the scores on the Cariostat test at the time of permanent tooth eruptionand the caries incident in the permanent dentition.